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He's the only one who remembers that the universe they live in isn't what it once was — or perhaps more significantly, what it once could've been.
The key word there is remembers; there are certainly people who are aware of it, because he'd known better than to try to keep it a secret from them. Kakyoin knows about it, of course, because Kakyoin is the one person who's always known him better than anyone else. Kakyoin would've caught on quickly that he inevitably grows distant and withdrawn whenever people utter phrases like Kakyoin-kun's miraculous recovery and held on against all odds and a real fighter, that one, so he didn't even bother to try and hide it from Kakyoin any longer than was really prudent to do so. The other Crusaders know about it, too, in varying degrees — mostly Jiji, but Polnareff as well, and he's pretty sure there's a file on it buried somewhere at the Speedwagon Foundation, even though it's also the sort of file that's restricted under so many levels of confidentiality that Polnareff sometimes jokes about how that information comes on a need-to-know basis and there's nobody in the entire universe who really needs to know it.
It was weird telling Jiji, because once things were changed from what they'd once been, Jiji didn't remember that there had once been a timeline where he didn't have a husband as well as a wife — that there was once a timeline where he'd hated Switzerland almost as much as he's always hated Japan, because both countries had once taken something he loved away from him. It was weird going home to find his mother recovered and his two other grandparents waiting for him. They'd made a kind of picturesque sight: the three of them, all varying degrees of blond and gray, idling by the door while sunbeams turned their hair hues of gold and silver. It's burned into his memory, the sight of them standing there together in the afternoon light as they'd watched for their boys to finally return back from the long journey that'd taken them so far from home.
The one that stands out in his mind, though, is and will always be Polnareff. It's understandable, maybe, because Polnareff was the one who faced the Stand called Judgment and so to some extent he's already been offered an opportunity like this before. But to this day, it still resonates with him on a level he can never seem to articulate, that he'd offered Polnareff the chance to have his sister alive again and Polnareff had told him no. He'd avenged her with his own two hands, he'd explained with the quiet honor of a knight like the one his Chariot resembles; that was his wrong to set right, and he'd done it, and even if it meant foregoing the chance to undo her death entirely, even if it meant sacrificing the opportunity to see her alive again —
If you start trying to unmake every wrong you ever see, Polnareff had said, clasping his shoulder gently, then you're going to do nothing but rearrange the world over and over for the rest of your life, and you'll still never succeed. So I won't let you, mon ami. I'll see her again when it's time. I don't need or want wishes of what might have been.
He reminds himself of that a lot, these days. Sometimes he thinks he'll never stop being grateful for Polnareff's honor, his resolve, his determination to lead by example in that one singular instance, to make his own path a little easier to tread. It's too easy, too tempting a trap, to look at everything that goes wrong in this world as a personal failure, a crisis or calamity that he could've and should've prevented. Polnareff never lets him forget that even though his power comes with responsibility attached, that still doesn't make everything his responsibility. It shouldn't be, and it doesn't have to be.
(Polnareff has an unusually lucky day every year on his birthday. It's subtle enough that he doesn't feel bad about tweaking a few threads in the fabric of the universe to make it perpetually so, and it's his own quiet way of saying thank you to the man who he still sometimes envisions as a guardian angel, bearing down on Dio with his Chariot's sword drawn in righteous determination to avenge him when he was never really dead at all.)
The two people he does end up discussing it with, on occasion, are Rohan and Giorno. They're good to touch base with, good reference points, good guidance and good anchors at once. Both of them understand on a level that most people can't, what it feels like to be granted near-godlike powers and left to be the custodian of those abilities with no checks or restrictions on them. Rohan can write anything in a person's pages and cause it to become absolutely true with his Heaven's Door; Giorno can imbue life into places where it previously never existed, can will bodies to restore themselves, can attach ghosts to corpses, can undo parts of the universe if he so wills it. To some degree, both of them understand him, and they're both personally familiar with the position he's in: wielding the capacity to simply decide that something should be different than it is, and to make it so with a touch.
Both of them, he thinks, could stop him if they tried — if he needed to be stopped. Both of them respect that if he willed it, he could prevent them from stopping him. It's a power struggle that none of them has any interest in provoking, a cold war that never begins in the first place. Sometimes they wonder, idly, who would beat who, in the same way that schoolchildren bicker over which superhero would outdo another. It's purely academic, always, and no one feels threatened by it — at least, as far as he knows, which is also all that he really wants to know — and more importantly all of them feel a little less alone.
But all of that, everything that Jiji and Polnareff and Kakyoin and his friends know, it's not the same as remembering. He's still the only one who remembers. He's the only one still sometimes haunted by the sound of a voice over the ambulance radio saying Kakyoin Noriaki is dead, who still jumps a little when he's faced with the sight of Abdul and Iggy and always feels compelled to draw out his goodbyes because he recalls one timeline where he never got to say goodbye in the first place. He remembers a world where things were worse.
He likes this universe better now, but always makes sure to acknowledge that it's not perfect, and shouldn't be, and doesn't have to be. Kakyoin has grown deft at changing the channel away from the evening news and onto something more lighthearted, even though it's only a temporary reprieve and the headlines are still waiting for him in the paper the next morning. It's hard not to read those bolded sentences as indictments of his own failure to do something about them: five people died in a fire, two people were shot, one convicted felon escaped from prison, and somehow he should've been there to fix all of those things but he wasn't.
Sometimes it makes him laugh, wryly, when he remembers Dio telling him how the power of The World was the power to reign over the world. Now he's got the ability to do precisely that, however he wants, at his own discretion, and it doesn't feel like a power so much as it does a burden.
So he tries to keep his world small, and his goals close and distinguishable. He tries to live in the here and now, so he can't get lost in the maybes and could-bes of what once was and what might still be coming.
Once upon a time, Kakyoin recovers, and they go back to school. They laugh about how the pressures of exams don't seem like much in comparison anymore. He gets nervous anyway when Kakyoin suggests having him over for dinner so he can meet his parents. He brings a gift of cherries, and almost succumbs to the temptation to change them to apples when he learns that Kakyoin's mother likes those better, but he doesn't because it feels wrong to get them to like him by cheating, and the cherries make Kakyoin happiest anyway.
There's one time when he does cheat, and it's when he meets Jolyne's mother.
(...No, not like that. Who do you think he is, Jiji?)
Kakyoin knows about Jolyne; he'd made sure of that early on. They've talked about it, worked it out, agreed on a lot of it and compromised on the rest. It's not as though they don't have living present proof that things like this can work out — look at Jiji and Grandma Suzie and Grandpa Caesar, they're happy and merry and had to figure it out back in the 1940s, when things were assuredly a lot more complicated on that front than they are now. So it's not as though they can't make it work, but it's definitely weird to be hashing out how they're going to do it at a time long before they've ever met the third member of their trio, years before they've ever even seen her face.
When they meet her, that's when Jotaro cheats. They meet her and he knows, or at least he thinks he knows, so he cheats and asks Star Platinum if he's right.
It's hard, trying to become friends with the future mother of your daughter when you're the only one who knows how that's going to unfold. He doesn't like it, honestly; it feels underhanded and manipulative somehow, like he's taking advantage of her simply because he already knows who she is and what she'll be. He wants to ask Star to make him forget, to change the universe to un-ring the bell and make it so that he'd never asked the question in the first place.
But that's dangerous, so instead he does what he would've asked Rohan to do for him, if it weren't for the fact that he's not going to meet Rohan for another decade yet. He words it carefully and makes it a part of himself — if something is about to happen that would prevent Jolyne from existing, then I'll remember — and then makes himself forget, because Polnareff had already taught him the value in sometimes doing things the hard way, and the truth is that acting solely out of the direction of duty instead of his feelings is what already ruined his marriage and made his daughter hate him in a different life. Jolyne shouldn't exist because he felt he had to; she should exist because she has a family waiting who wants her and who'll love her the way that she ought to be loved.
(But she also deserves to exist, so he does what he figures a responsible father should do and puts a safeguard in place so that he can't fuck it up for her in the meantime.)
And it turns out he doesn't. He doesn't fuck it up; he can't have, because he doesn't remember her until the instant the nurse has bundled her up and placed her in his arms, and he's standing there panicking about dropping her or smothering her or crushing her somehow with his gigantic gorilla biceps, and everyone's laughing at him and Kakyoin has his arms around him, and he looks down at her face and the sudden return of his memories lights up like fireworks in the back of his mind.
Hello, Jolyne, he thinks, and he and Kakyoin team up to outvote her mother, who's been favoring "Karen" all through the pregnancy no matter how vehemently he's insisted that his daughter can't be a Karen, period.
She's not a Karen. She's absolutely a Jolyne, and her existence is like a miracle because he has no way of knowing a single thing about how he'd raised her (or didn't raise her, as the case may be) in a different life, so there's no way he could possibly be cheating at making her into who she's supposed to be — but she develops into it anyway, all on her own. She's a beautiful girl, happy and spirited; she takes well to having three parents because there's always someone around to love her, and if one ever tells her something she doesn't agree with, then she's still got two more to go try and persuade in her favor instead.
(When she's school-age, her mother sits them down to talk about her dreams of a career, the field she wants to pursue; they talk about how they're going to make it work and it's almost a little unsettling, how determined they all are to make sure that everyone can be happy with the decision they arrive at. They talk and they compromise and they come up with a system that will work, and he doesn't have to bend the universe to accommodate anything. The normal mundane magic of talking settles it all on its own, and he thinks he'll never stop being astounded by that no matter how many times he sees it done.)
So they work it out; they've worked it out. He and Kakyoin keep custody of Jolyne most of the time, with regular visits to her mother when her work schedule isn't eating her alive, and group outings all together as often as they can facilitate it. Jolyne always chooses where they go for the latter, of course, but it's fascinating to see the way she goes out of her way to try to accommodate her parents in her choices. It's always the amusement park for Mama, who loves to get out and unwind in the daylight after a long stretch of time behind a desk; it's please-please-Chuck-E-Cheese for Papa, who'll buy her hundreds of tokens and steal half of them for himself as they assault the available arcade games together; it's the beach for Dad, and no one is surprised, and he relishes the time spent building sandcastles and hunting seashells and splashing in the surf with his daughter while her poor redheaded parents hide out under a beach umbrella and still come home sunburned every time.
This morning, though, it's just the two of them — him and Kakyoin. Jolyne's been with her mom for the better part of a week, after a much-deserved promotion had come with a hefty raise and an extra few days of vacation time. She's coming home this afternoon, he knows, and absently untangles himself from his sleeping boyf— husb— Kakyoin as best he can to peer up and out of the curtained window over their bed. He'd thought he'd heard the sound of rain, and he'd been right; the world outside is shades of gray and green, and the droplets are clinging to the window glass in a spatter pattern while they await enough weight to begin trickling down.
Jolyne will want to collect worms and splash in the puddles, he muses sleepily, and sinks back down to snuggle up behind Kakyoin once more. Maybe she'll find a frog and try to sneak it inside again, to equally disastrous effect as the last time.
(They need to take her to see Giorno sometime. He's honestly not sure which part of the word "frog" made him think of it — the thought of Gold Experience being able to make her more frogs than she could ever dream imaginable, or the fact that her Uncle Polnareff is in Italy playing godfather to the adolescent mob, and still as cheery and French as ever.)
They stay in bed late. The barometric pressure changes that accompany rainfall sometimes cause Kakyoin's old wounds to ache, so they linger under the covers as long as they can, and when it's finally time to get up, he dresses first and moots the issue entirely by carrying Kakyoin from their bed to the cushioned window seat at the front of the house so he can watch for the car bearing Jolyne to arrive. It's a sleepy dreary Saturday, and that's sort of fine; he makes coffee for the two of them and hands off one mug to Hierophant's hovering tentacle when it's ready — because, of course, there's no sense in having a long-distance Stand if you're not going to use it, and even on Kakyoin's more immobile days he can still reach anything in the house with his Hierophant if he tries.
When he returns with his own mug, Kakyoin has his temple resting against the rain-streaked glass and his coffee held in both hands, warming up his fingers while he waits for it to cool enough to drink. It's simple and natural to wander over and slide in to sit behind him, spreading his legs into an easy V so that Kakyoin can settle between them and lean on his chest instead of on the window, which he does.
"The shower faucet's been leaking again," Kakyoin says by way of greeting, which says a lot about their skewed perceptions of romanticism these days.
He ducks his head down anyway, pressing a half-kiss, half-nuzzle to the top of his head where it fits so neatly beneath his chin. "I'll take a look at it later."
"You're going to fix it?" Kakyoin remarks sleepily, as the opening notes of a chuckle begin to burble up in the back of his throat.
"It probably just needs tightening up. Or to replace that thing. The seal. I'll take a look."
And now Kakyoin does laugh, which earns him a nudge to the side that he quickly protests and then proceeds to ruin with even more laughing.
He sighs. "What?" he demands, brow furrowing in mild exasperation.
"I was just thinking," Kakyoin answers, squelching his giggles long enough to get his sentences out. "Remember when we met? You used to solve every problem you came up against by punching it. So I just imagined — "
He dissolves into laughter again, and for a second his words paint enough of a picture that Jotaro can see the humor that's provoking it too — the thought of waging war against a dripping shower head, of him standing back against the sink with his hands in his pockets and his hips jutting forward while Star Platinum's fists launch a hurricane of punishment at the chrome and the tile —
Kakyoin's laughter goes pleasantly with the rain, he muses, and ignores the heat in his face in favor of looking out the window instead.
"What time did she say she'd be here with Jolyne?" he asks eventually, after Kakyoin's had the chance to wind down a little from his mirth. "Late afternoon?"
"She said about two o'clock," Kakyoin replies, settling back against him and tucking his head into the crook of his shoulder with an involuntary sigh. "We've got a little more time yet."
"Okay," he says softly, and sets his mug aside to wrap his arms more securely around Kakyoin, and doesn't stop to linger on distracting notions of what might have been, because for the moment he's completely encompassed by the quiet reality of what is, and he's long since learned to treasure the few perfect seconds where that's just enough.
And for a few perfect seconds, it is.